The
New Silo is like a hugely simplified Old Silo - as if all its essential forms
and components were abstracted and remade in their most obvious shapes on a
monolithic scale (a giant child's concept-model). What in the Old Silo is
blurred and complicated by style and a building technology (brick and wood)
that requires a complex craft of fitting, balancing, bracing, is replaced by the
massive crudity of excessive physical resources (of reinforced concrete and industrial steel) ... the New Silo is an engineer's jelly!

The old Silo's boarded attics with
their deep wooden trusses and posts, have here become a single vast unencumbered
steel-covered space edged with steel-braced glass; its ground-floor of many
thick-walled chambers: a huge single discharge-hall opening to the dijk through
loading doors, raised on the podium of a half-sunk concrete basement full of
squat pillars like a subterranean car-park.

The
New-Silo was squatted in september 1993 - organised by Marcel [Re:
S DRYING-TOWER].
Except for the discharge-hall -
used for warehousing by a local company (tolerated by the Silo's owners as
effective 'anti-squatters') - the Collective controls the whole New Silo. The
pillared basement is hired to rave promoters; the vast light attic and the cavities in the vertical-conveyor
'tower' that climbs to it are used for art
and dance performances (of Silo origin or outside groups); and now in the tower's
apex a single apt is being made.

NEW-SILO
FROM STENENHOOFD
(pic
8-95 / to NW)

NEW-SILO
TOWER (VIEW FROM KOIK'S E-ROOF)
(pic
9-94 / to S)

NEW-SILO:
SILO DISCHARGE HALL (NEVER SQUATTED)
(pic
9-94 / to S)

The
owners of this building allow a company to use this space for storage to
help prevent squatting by the Collective. The
Collective sealed the access from this space to their squatted
Basement below.

.

the
BASEMENT

:
PUBLIC RAVE & PARTY SPACE
[all measurements are approximate]

So much of the huge 40x19m
sub-lit basement is full of squat pillars - that obstruct with their width all
but short diagonal glimpses, allowing relaxed sightings only along 9 transverse and 5 longitudinal avenues (whose perspectives tend to
vanish into darkness!) - that disorientation and a sense of multiple isolations
in its pillar-cornered 'spatial-cells' is inevitable even when the basement is
empty. In spite of this claustrophobic, socially divisive and physically brutal
environment; or perhaps because of it, the New-Silo basement became one of
Amsterdam's most successful regular 'rave' venues!

In this undifferentiated place
one is 'oriented' (if one did not wander far into its depths) by its slightly
lower three-bay entry portion with its 'anchoring' feature; a 7m pit (in fact
the ultimate base of the New-Silo's 'tower') whose 6m hatch-like opening
yawns in the
floor near the basement's entry.

An
urgent task after the september 1993 squatting was to seal a 5x6m hole above
the basement pit, which opened in the Discharge Hall above - a space used by a company
friendly with the owners. When the company was absent the Discharge Hall was
broken into and the hole sealed with wood covered in conveyor-belting
'fixed with many nails': "unpleasant to remove", 'it would break
saw-blades'. By november 1993
the pit had been cleared and before the end of 1993 the first public
event was held. By spring 1994 there were regular "parties" and the new
venue was well known in the city.

NEW-SILO
EVENT FLYER (A6): "5-YAAR SILO" EVENT
(4-6-94)

The
basement is sometimes used for Silo
initiated events, such as the public "5 Yaar Silo" "Quack" Danceparty, and is routinely hired for weekly raves
and parties by event organisers from
outside the Silo.

NEW-SILO:
DIJK ENTRY TO THE BASEMENT PUBLIC SPACE
(pic
4-6-94 / to E) [film has
colour-damage]

Public
access
to the Basement entry is controlled by raising/lowering over it a
huge step-shaped steel flap raised by cable from a redundant cantilever
above.

Here,
on the occasion of the "5 Yaar Silo" event, a notice fixed to
the 'riser' of this 'yawning beak' invites visitors to "duck" as
they pass under it to the descent. A big oval puddle (like a slice of
egg!) lies on a steel slab before it.

The
basement's closed public entry - this huge steel flap is lowered over its access
steps. At its far end is a locked gate defending access to the space between the
Silos - access for the New-Silo and its basement / the S-Tower / and all the rest via the
rear quay.

The
dignity of this massive and totally pragmatic object is (perhaps ironically)
deflated by the trite little chalked-on flower (probably by a visitor).

NEW-SILO:
DIJK EXIT FROM SW CORNER OF BASEMENT
(pic
6-94 / to EEN)

At
the SW corner of the Basement is a small stair emerging via a small door onto the dijk
loading platform, to the right of the overwhelming
graffiti. Descent to ground is via a hazardous looking pile of logs.

NEW-SILO
BASEMENT: PIT BEFORE CLEARANCE
(pic
8-93 / to E)

Before
it was cleared this pit showed its size, not by its depth - for its bottom
was hidden - but by the size of the objects that had been hurled in as if
it were a dustbin: a chaotic tangle including whole flights of steel stairs
and rectangular steel tubes of bucket-conveyors.

To empty it an electric driven hoist was installed, working through a pulley
welded over the pit's centre.

NEW-SILO
BASEMENT: VIEW OVER PIT
(pic
9-94 / to SSE)

The
basement pit is the deepest place in the New-Silo & the lowest
level of its 'tower' - about 55m from its roof. Huge concrete blocks
encumber its floor - (?)the mountings of the tower's
vertical-conveyor motors(?). (About 50m above, analogous
concrete mountings encumber the tower's topmost space, Jaroen's
proto-apt).

NEW-SILO
BASEMENT: INSIDE THE PIT
(pic
9-94 / to S)

Up
on the platform behind the "trousers" (the distributor-box
junction of 3 chutes) [ref: MILOU - GR-FLOOR: Stove] stands an
onlooker, otherwise - apart from the incongruous foreground settee &
old streamers - there is little evidence of the regular rave-parties.

NEW-SILO
BASEMENT: FROM ENTRY (WITH PARTY DECOR)
(pic
4-6-94 / to SE)

One
enters down a ramp (on party nights tickets are transacted at this point)
and past the pit into the main space (here
preparations are underway and the entry is barred). On
the right side red-lit steps descend into the pit.

One
morning, just south of the New-Silo's quay, on the pavement opposite the
bus stop, this group of party leavers spontaneously posed.

The
rail track before me has issued from the Silo's dijk and continues left to De
Loods-Westerdok.

.

the TOWER & SILO-CHARGING HALL: VENUES OF PUBLIC ART PERFORMANCES[all measurements are approximate]

The stair-route
from the cat-walk entrance between the Silos, zigzags up through a spectacular concrete-beamed
space laced with enormous tubes,
and the incongruous remainders of 'performances': a miniature auditorium of ad hoc
scrap-wood benches, a
rope-threaded shaft, a book on a chair.

On an enclosed landing at
30m, in contrast to the verticality of the tower, through a small
side-door and beyond a cluster of colour-coded chutes, is the surprise of the vast light flat
space of the silo-charging floor - a venue for theatrical art-performance events
and the limit of public access. Up and past the charging-hall the tower is released from the
building's bulk and one enters the private domain of the New Silo's only
apt [Re: NEW-SILO - p2 ].

NEW-SILO
THEATRE POSTER ON STREET
(pic 9-94 / to SSE)

A
welded steel rocking 'road-work' sign left standing on the Westerdoksdijk pavement
near the Silo entry.

Having
climbed 8 stair flights inside the 'tower' we reach its biggest cavity: level-4 - three 'floors' deep and threaded with the shafts of bucket-conveyors
(that raised grain to the silo-charging floor). Portions of the shafts of the vertical-conveyors have been
unbolted and excised by the squatters to make both the floor
space and the tubes accessible for performances.

Through this dramatic space we mount 6 more flights to level-5, which affords the only opportunity, other than the basement, to
experience a New-Silo location alternative to the tower.

From
the level 5 landing, through a small door in its confining S-wall, is the charging-floor of the silos, its entry framed by bizarrely bent and coloured
tubes - a cramped baroque proscenium for a vast glass-walled stage - venue for art and dance performance events.